@dczzler ⟶ Gabriel Summers
The world beats dead and dull, a slackened drum. The streets come fast, one succeeding the other, the bleeding lights of the city prick at his eyes and each sleepless night wedges distance between him and home. Where was home? Even the nebulous stars he'd once possessed seemed foreign and unattainable. Scott's face is a muted, muddy imposter in the back of his brain, melting and resurfacing, but never in a way that looks quite right. Strange, that it is gone. Gone in a blink, enflamed, engulfed by his belligerent tongue. Gabriel was again an orphan stuttering into a succession of shelters.
It doesn't quite explain how he is here though, splintered and sweltering on a stomach full of tequila in Alison's car. His cheek is pressed flush to the misty glass. He can hardly discern between the purr of the engine and his own pleading pulse, reaches out to angle the rearview mirror to meet his face, a beam of passing headlights drowning in his irises. Idly, he wonders what he'd have looked like as a kid. Would his eyes have always been so suffocating? There is no youth to retreat into the comfort of, no memory left unturned.
"I don't need a babysitter."
Gabriel's voice is a circling drain, pilling with exhaustion, gone before it can bite. He casts her a suspicious slot of his eyes, the animal in his gaze softened by the flush of red dusting his nose. Another sharp turn and the headlights briefly paint over a mother, easing a sleeping child into the backseat. Gabriel's stomach lurches.
"If you're here on behalf of my brothers the X-Men, you can forget anything about me going back." Silly, petulant deflection. He was not welcome back, he knows this. Still, the wound in him flutters at the idea that Alison might prove him wrong, the overwhelm of emotion stealing his face back to the road, less she catch him wanting. To hell with it. Nothing hurts if he won't let it. He concedes.
"Where are we going?"
